Also, as a side note, why do you enjoy using machine readable file sizes over human readable? The latter, as chosen by their name, are meant to be easier to use for humans.
I would also like to add to the case twic showed that often I am using ls to see if a file is growing. In human-readable format hides the actual size and rounds -- it could move 200 megs or more before the human-readable output is updated from 1G to 1.2G.
To address why backwards comparability is needed is because of muscle memory. Its not likely that this tool will be on every system I use. I don't want to have to think about what system I am on and what command I need to run. It would be nice to also be able to alias it to 'ls' as ls is way faster to type than eax -- all on the left hand makes it MUCH slower -- although I am sure there will be those who say different -- but they are wrong.